The Best Sans Serif Fonts

There’s nothing very mysterious about sans serif typefaces—their glyphs are designed without serifs at their ends. But there are a lot of preconceptions about them, and a few misconceptions too. We sort typefaces into two categories, serif and sans serif, because it’s easy to see whether the letters have serifs or not. But that’s not always the most useful way to divide up type designs. (And type designers like to push the boundaries, by inventing letters that straddle the line between categories. Every definition has exceptions.) The essential thing about sans serif faces is that they are, in general, more forceful and in-your-face than serif typefaces. Visually, sans serifs tend to hold the space better—that is, their simple lines sharply delineate simpler shapes—and that is why we use them so often for display type and also on forms. Sans serifs generally have a simplicity and clarity, even a starkness—qualities that let them stand out against whatever their background may be: paper, screen, highway sign, movie marquee. But in practice, it all depends on the particular typeface you’re using. Other factors, such as the underlying structure of the letters, may be more important than whether they have serifs on their ends. There’s more in common between, say, Sabon and Syntax, even though one is a serif face and the other isn’t, than between Syntax and Arial Black (Figure 1). Both Sabon and Syntax are derived from old style typefaces, and ultimately from Renaissance handwriting, whereas Arial’s structure is essentially brutal and industrial.

Are Sans Serifs Harder

to Read?

We’re used to reading text in serif typefaces, whether they be neoclassical “modern” faces such as Didot and Bodoni or old style faces such as Caslon and Garamond. The serifs, and the modulated widths of the strokes in each letter, do tie together the letters and help create the “texture” of text; that’s why the usual rule of thumb is to use a serif face for text and save sans serifs for headlines. Yet we are also used to reading sans serif typefaces in telephone books, in timetables, in classified ads, and on business cards, so it’s clearly not true that sans serifs should be used only at large sizes. In fact, often the simplicity of a sans serif will work best for very small text. The first sans serif typefaces appeared around the beginning of the 19th century, but initially this style of lettering was used to convey an antique feeling; it harked back to ancient Greek and early Roman inscriptions, long before the Renaissance tradition that most of our types grew out of. Only later, as the 19th century rolled on and bigger, bolder, stronger typefaces were invented in the boom of advertising ephemera, did sans serif become identified with the Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, this new association was taken further—quite deliberately—as avant-garde designers claimed that sans serif type was the only type appropriate to use during the new age of the machine. Today, we’re used to seeing serif and sans serif typefaces used together all the time, and we just pick what seems appropriate for a particular use.

What Sans Serif Typeface Should I Use?

Get away from the usual suspects. Arial and Helvetica are on everyone’s system, so they’re boring; they won’t stand out from the noise around them (unless they’re used very, very well). Try a humanist sans instead, one based on the rhythms of the handwriting of Renaissance Italian scribes. Use a typeface that has some grit, some lively variation, not just the monotonous beat of a factory assembly line. Look for variation in the widths of the strokes (Figure 2). Most sans serifs don’t have much variation; they tend to be, or at least to appear, monoline; i.e., all the same thickness. This is part of the idea of simplification, of leaving behind frills such as serifs and modulation and marching into the brave new rational future.

But even that iconic machine-age sans serif, Futura—which looks as though it’s completely geometrical—actually has loads of little modifications and fine-tunings in the details of the letters; it’s not perfectly regular at all. And it’s all the better for it. There are a lot of newer humanist sans serif typefaces created in the last 20 to 50 years, and many of them are excellent. One of the most ubiquitous has been Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta (Figure 3), which was once dubbed the “Helvetica of the ’90s”—not because it resembled Helvetica, but because it fit into the same ecological niche (and did it much better). Meta’s forms are softer and more comfortably readable than Helvetica’s; you can, in fact, easily read page after page of text in Meta, if it’s set correctly. (Don’t tighten up its letterspacing! Except maybe at display sizes.) Meta was designed with subtle curves and angles to the ends of some of the strokes that make them flow more easily in text; they look smooth en masse, but you can distinguish each letter from the next quite clearly. (Geometric and industrial sans serifs tend to reuse the same few forms in letter after letter, making them all look very similar. That’s a nice design idea, but it’s not a way to make readable type. The more variation there is between the different letters of the alphabet—and the different numerals!—the easier it is to distinguish them as you read.) Spiekermann has designed a number of other sans serif typefaces, most of them variations of the same underlying forms but adapted to specific situations, to solve specific problems; FF Info, for example, is designed for signage, and ITC Offi- cina Sans for office correspondence (Figure 4). Each of them has a true italic, not just a slanted roman like Helvetica’s “oblique”; though in Meta and the rest, the slant is not very steep and the result is still sober and nonflamboyant. Myriad, designed for Adobe by Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach, is based more directly on old style letterforms, though any idiosyncratic personality was intentionally filed away to make it a generic-looking sans (Figure 5). Myriad, like Meta, doesn’t show much variation of stroke thickness at all, but it does have a rounded humanist form that makes it warm and cool at the same time. Michael Abbink’s FF Kievit is in much the same part of the spectrum: quiet, subdued personality but a clear, modern feel (Figure 6). Lucas de Groot’s extensive Thesis family is more unabashedly humanist in its underlying forms, yet somehow it caught on in corporate advertising for a time in the 2000s. Thesis is a three-part family: TheSans, TheSerif, and TheMix (this last has some serifs). All three of them appear monoline, though they have very strong oblique stress and extremely humanist structures. They are also spaced very well by the designer, not crushed together too tight to read (Figure 7). One of the ways a type designer can give an otherwise monoline sans serif some sparkle is to vary how the ends of the strokes are formed and to cut deeply into the acute angles where one stroke meets another. These techniques are used in typefaces such as Matthew Carter’s Bell Centennial; since those faces are intended to be used at very small sizes, these details make them easier to read in a telephone directory, but they look exaggerated if they’re blown up to large sizes—an effect that some designers seek in headline faces (Figure 8). Typefaces such as Whitney, from Hoefler & Co., and Joshua Darden’s Freight Sans use oblique cuts to the ends of some strokes, and unusual angles here and there in certain letters, to give character to the design. There’s a certain bounce to the letters, which is created by varying the curves and the stroke thickness and the shapes of the counters (the spaces inside the letters) as well as by modulating angles and stroke ends (Figure 9). Two most unusual humanist sans serifs are FF Quadraat Sans and FF Scala Sans (Figure 10). The first, which was designed by Fred Smeijers as a companion to his old style serif face FF Quadraat, has shapes like no other sans serif; the form itself is lively, not just the details. It looks as though it’s been drawn, somehow, yet it’s not really calligraphic at all. Quadraat Sans is almost too lively for some of the usual uses of a sans serif; it doesn’t hold the space so much as fill it up. But it would be eminently readable in text. Martin Majoor’s FF Scala Sans was also designed as a companion to an earlier serif, FF Scala; the sans is stripped down so much that it looks like a skeleton of itself, yet its forms are so completely old style that Scala Sans is one of the most readable sans serif text faces in the world. If the style and feel of it fit the project, you could set a book in it.

How Do I Use Them?

Is there anything fundamentally different about how you’d treat a sans serif as compared to a serif face? This may be another generality, but, despite all the variations of both serif and sans designs: Yes, there is. Sans serif typefaces often need to be set with a little looser letterspacing than serif faces (especially old style serif faces). The tendency is to close up the letters, to bunch them together, but because there’s so little variation in the width of the strokes, the shapes inside the letters are more regular, less forgiving, so the space between letters has to be generous enough to compensate for this. It’s especially important not to set very light weights too tightly. Since the strokes are thin, the counters are huge and they have to be balanced by space between the letters. Otherwise, the strokes of adjacent letters tend to blend together and it’s hard to recognize the letter shapes. Too many of the older sans serif typefaces, when they were adapted to digital format, were given much too tight a default spacing in their lightest weights; Gill Sans Light, for example, needs to be tracked loosely if it’s to be readable at all (Figure 11).

Evert Bloemsma took this necessity and used it to good effect in creating a four-weight type family, FF Balance, where every weight takes up exactly the same horizontal space (Figure 12). In other words, you can change from Balance Light to Balance Black, and every line will still end at the same place. Bloemsma adjusted the space between letters so that the bolder weights fit tighter and the lighter weights fit looser, and he designed the letters so that each weight would look right at exactly the same width. (Balance is also unusual for a more immediately noticeable reason: Its stress is horizontal, not vertical, so the horizontal strokes are slightly thicker than the vertical stems. A very unusual, but effective, design.) Sans serifs, just like serif faces, need enough leading not to look cramped. And they need an appropriate line length, but that varies from face to face; it’s hard to generalize. Some sans serif typefaces seem easiest to read in narrow, unjustified columns. Of course, this is true of some serif faces, too. Experiment and see what works best.

What About Headlines?

The most common use of sans serif typefaces is still as a display face paired with a serif text face. The purpose is to provide contrast (Figure 13). Size and position may provide a certain amount of contrast, but the difference in form between a serif and a sans also helps. Sometimes we even use a sans serif at text sizes, to distinguish different kinds of text.